Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 4.x

[BCormier]

Anyone else notice that lightroom 4 is slow? Ligtroom 3 always ran fast on my system but Lightroom 4 seemlingly lags quite a bit.

My system is:

2.10 ghz Intel Core i3 Sandy Bridge

8 GB Ram

640 GB Hard Drive

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Message title was edited by: Brett N

[bob frost]

From: "rpavich1234

I'm sorry but I've been following this thread and the whole discussion is

just comical.

The ever-growing list of things to do to make LR4 even in the same

performance neighborhood is staggering.

Imagine buying a new car and have it perform worse by a large margin than

last years model that you currently drive. Then imagine changing the

motor, suspension, tires, fuel system etc...all in an effort to get it to

even perform CLOSE to what last years model did.

Sorry, but LR 4.1 runs fine for thousands (or millions?) of people,

including me. So we have to try and work out what is different about the

computers/images/catalogs/previews of those who find LR 4.1 doesn't run

fine. I used SSDs for my catalog and previews in LR3, not just for LR4. It

speeds everything up, since retrieval from disk is usually the slowest bit

of most computers. An SSD in my cheap Samsung laptop makes it fine for

demonstrating LR 4.1 in lectures - no slowdowns or hangups.

I also did various of the things I have listed (export catalog to a new one,

create all new previews, etc) when upgrading from LR2 to LR3, so nothing new

there. A 'clean' setup usually runs faster than a dirty one, just as with

OSs.

I doubt if LR 4 will ever be faster than LR3, because it does a lot more

things, and does them better.

Might be a good idea if people stopped asking for new things to be added.

They all add 'weight to the car' and slow it down.

Bob Frost

[rpavich1234]

Bob,

Sorry but that answer is also comical.

This isn't just isolated pockets of people who are having slight issues...this is big enough to cause discussions on many many forums and in the blog-o-sphere in general....

You didn't really say anything new in your response...just repeated what you've already said...that this version is more bloated and less responsive in performance...yes...we know that....lol...

As for the excuse that now because I have a new feature in my car (air conditioning in the back seat and lighted vanity mirrors) that I should accept that my car bogs down when I hit the gas?

Or that the car works fine for a lot of people?

that's also comical.

[Keith Reeder]

rpavich1234 wrote:

Bob,

this is big enough to cause discussions on many many forums and in the blog-o-sphere in general....

Only because the internet is self-selecting for complaining - like it or not, there's simply no evidence that this is anything like as pervasive an issue as your (necessarily skewed) interpretation of the relevance of the "blogosphere" suggests.

You didn't really say anything new in your response...just repeated what you've already said..

Uuuumm... Pot calling the kettle black? You're hardly breaking new ground in your posts, are you? Actively choosing to ignore the inherent validity of Bob's comments doesn't make 'em any less valid.

I'll ask my usual question: if Lr is the problem, why aren't we all suffering? Until someone comes up with a convincing answer to that question, you're not going to win the argument.

[rpavich1234]

Uuuumm... Pot calling the kettle black?

Yep....observing how lame LR4 is isn't a new complaint.

You're hardly breaking new ground in your posts, are you?

Nope...no new ground...we all know the problems LR4 has.

Actively choosing to ignore the inherent validity of Bob's comments doesn't make 'em any less valid.

I'm not actively choosing to ignore them....I only made the observation that he's repeating how we can "fix" LR4...which was what was so comical in the first place!...what hoops we discuss to jump through to get even acceptable performance out of a "better" piece of software!

I'll ask my usual question: if Lr is the problem, why aren't we all suffering?

Because whatever bugs are involved; aren't following certain patterns...that's all. It's not as simple as "all old machines will lag" or "all people who use SSD's will have acceptable performance"...it's more complicated.

I've been in your shoes on other software releases...defending a buggy piece of software because I didn't happen to have the worst of the ill effects where others did....after MANY dicussions just like the one we're having,, the software company issued several bug fix releases and cleared up the performance issues. That's what I'm hoping happens here.

I hope that one day we can all have your experience...without having to change the motor, suspension, undercarriage, AC, drive train, tires, fuel system...et al.

Until someone comes up with a convincing answer to that question, you're not going to win the argument.

There is no argument to win...there is definitely some remaining major bugs in this particular piece of software that need to be ironed out...that's not even a question.

[BeerStalker]

Keith_Reeder wrote:

I'll ask my usual question: if Lr is the problem, why aren't we all suffering? Until someone comes up with a convincing answer to that question, you're not going to win the argument.

I have over 20 years of application, operating system and storage system support and engineering experience for some of the biggest names in the industry I can assure you all this "I'm not seeing it so it's your system at fault" talk is very wide of the mark.

A simple bug that everyone saw would be caught before release. A complex problem often only shows up in a customer environment. Some customers will see it, some not. All sorts of things in the evironment can tickle bugs in applications but the fault is still in with the application not the environment.

A simple counter to your argument is why only LR sees the problem. I have many other apps and the all work well except LR.

Considering how this thread has degenerated I think the best thing people can do is produce a canned example, preferably with a screenshot video, that can be given to Adobe.

[Keith Reeder]

I have over 20 years of application, operating system and storage system support and engineering experience for some of the biggest names in the industry I can assure you all this "I'm not seeing it so it's your system at fault" talk is very wide of the mark.

We can all swap stories about our experience in IT - it sometimes seems that there are more current and ex IT professionals on here than there are "just" photographers (yep, me too) and I'm afraid that we're going to have to agree to differ about your "assurance".

A simple counter to your argument is why only LR sees the problem. I have many other apps and the all work well except LR.

The simple answer to this is that Lr is widely acknowledged to be software that really stresses hardware, and it shows up bottlenecks in software/OS configurations too.

And they're local issues all...

[DavePinMinn]

Keith, I suspect you're right about IT people in here...  I THINK it's because digital photography has such an appeal to our geek nature!  I too have many years as a software engineer, database designer, and so on.  My wife has always said that digital photography came along at the perfect time for me.  It allows me to combine my love of computers and computing with my enjoyment of capturing moments...

UNFORTUNATELY, for those of us who do or did make our careers designing and building mission-critical systems, I suspect it also makes us far less tolerant of software that degrades from version to version.  Yes, we sometimes made mistakes and put out softwarse the crashed and burned spectacularly, but I can also remember the company I worked for recalling software and TELLING clients NOT to upgrade because of some problem that had been discovered.  And communicating to them that we were DEFINITELY and ABSOLUTELY working our collective fannies off to find and correct the problems.  I think the communication part was what clients appreciated most.

BUT, anyhow, back to the problem at hand...  In the middle of the night, I woke up with a thought (yes, I know, I desperately need to get a life)...  When I was testing yesterday, it APPEARED TO ME that the .dng files responded more slowly (slightly) than did the same files in .nef format.  But, that doesn't make sense.  The .dng files are smaller, there's no sidecar file to fiddle with, and the .dng is a proprietary (public) format created by Adobe rather than some reverse engineered thing...  Shouldn't they have been significantly FASTER to process/display than the .nef files?  What am I missing?

[fliplip1]

One of the things i tried when i had my old system was to convert a batch of Canon raw files to DNG. Other than the extra time it took (not long really) it made no difference to LR's speed.

I really dont think the file, or file size has any bering on this problem.

[bob frost]

From: "fliplip1

I really dont think the file, or file size has any bering on this problem.

Depends which bit of the 'LR is slow' problem you are talking about!! A 10MB

nef takes about 1 sec to render on my PC, a 20MB takes 2 secs, and a 40MB

takes 4 secs. Directly proportional to file size, but of course you a

probably right when talking about slowness in develop steps, sliders, etc.

Bob Frost

[fliplip1]

Yeah, im talking about overall slowness rather than rendering or anything that is obviously going to tax the CPU.

Even opening a new catalogue would give me not responding errors while it did its thing.

[Another_Photographer-qoO2PF]

Did anyone notice that

scrolling with the mouse in the library gives a very different user experience than scrolling with the arrow keys?  One is unbearable no matter how fast the system.  Guess which one.

(ii) switching from Library to Develop mode (the modality of it all) takes a long time even if the photo has been loaded into memory several times on a 32GB system?

(iii) upgrading from circa 2008 quadcore with 8GB and 1 hard drive to latest i7 with 32GB, SSD and HDD makes every other program faster, but various aspects of Lightroom are still slow?  (see above)

(iv) we keep getting advice to export the catalogue before importing (even though that results in some data fields being lost) and deleting preferences and presets.  We're just photographers not software engineers.  Shouldn't the advice be directed to the Lightroom engineers to kindly fix their, shall we say "outdated' database system so that it's as robust as can be?  They've had 4 shots at it, people, and it's stil a$$-backward.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

I've got one new addition to the list of suspects.  Color Noise Reduction slider set to 25 is faster to free up the sliders than any other setting, including 0.

[SistersCountry]

Well I'll be... From what I see so far it makes a significant difference on my machine. The folder I am working on and tested your suggestion with has lens corrections and CA corrections across the board too. (i7 16G Win64).

Thanks!

[rpavich1234]

Sadly not on my machine but I'm glad it's helping others.

[Ashvin_Ghisyawan]

I discoverd that lr is a lot faster, working on library mode in stead of develop mode. Also faster when I import the pictures without a preset.

kr,
Ashvin

www.totaalfotografie.nl

[DavePinMinn]

Unfortunately, Color noise reduction slider has always been at the default, which appears to be 25, on my systems.  If this is "significantly faster" I shudder to think what it must be like when it's NOT in this "significantly faster" setting. 

As time goes on, and I actually try to WORK on things on LR4.1, the appalling slowness becomes more and more apparent in many areas.  Yes, working in develop is just plain SLOW, no matter how many images you load or how many times you load them.  The library module is MARGINALLY faster, but it's sure no speed demon.  Cetainly significantly slower than V3...

And, it appears that ANOTHER month has gone by, and STILL no information from Adobe that they're AWARE there's a problem, WHAT they're doing, and/or WHEN we're likely to see a version that makes significant improvements.  800 pound gorilla syndrome?

[bcw99]

I have just been using LR4.1 and happened to be printingfrom my Firefox browser as well. It locked up LR for several seconds. I mention this as it might be a clue as to what is going on. Memory leak maybe, with the printer driver over-writing some memory address LR was trying to use? The developers need all the info they can get I'd guess.

Intel i5, 16Gb RAM, Win 7 64 on one SSD, another SSD for cache/catalog, Images on SATA mechanical.

[Sacha_]

After weeks of absolutely nasty performance with LR4.1 I today tried the trick someone posted here a while ago. I started LR via a batch file:

start "lightroom" /high /affinity 15 "c:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.1\lightroom.exe"

And to my surprise it WAAAAAAAY faster! I know that developing multithreaded apps is quite demanding but what Adobe's dev delivered until now is just CRAP!

My machine: i7-3930 hexacore, up-to-date chipset X79 and two fast SSDs and 16 GB RAM - more than fast enough you would think...

[RikkFlohr]

Sacha_ wrote:

After weeks of absolutely nasty performance with LR4.1 I today tried the trick someone posted here a while ago. I started LR via a batch file:

start "lightroom" /high /affinity 15 "c:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.1\lightroom.exe"

And to my surprise it WAAAAAAAY faster! I know that developing multithreaded apps is quite demanding but what Adobe's dev delivered until now is just CRAP!

My machine: i7-3930 hexacore, up-to-date chipset X79 and two fast SSDs and 16 GB RAM - more than fast enough you would think...

Did you try setting affinity and priority for the LR application through the Task Manager first? I am just curious about that verses via a batch file?

[SavagePhoto-lItHqa]

It is the same resutls just the bat is easier since its a one click launch.

[RikkFlohr]

Thanks SavagePhoto. That was the piece I was looking for.

[Jonz]

You go tmy attention.  LR has been giving me fits!  I am reloading it daily and Adobe support has no clue what they are doing.  I was thinking I needed to completely remove LR and start over but would like to give this solution a try.

Could you explain how to create a batch from your code.

I tried pasting it into the apple script editor but it wont run.

Thanks for the adivce!

Troy

[SavagePhoto-lItHqa]

I wish I could help but I have no idea how to do this on a mac.

[Jonz]

Thanks for the reply.  I see in your signature now.  LOL  At least I now know its not a platform specific problem